Motherboard: Victoria Mapplebeck’s decades-spanning document of single motherhood finds beauty in the passage of time

There’s a moment in this warm, frequently funny and ingeniously made documentary when its director Victoria Mapplebeck says, “It always helps me to look at something through a lens.” In this instance it’s a microscope lens, used to examine Mapplebeck’s breast cancer cells. Even though their presence signals the biggest crisis in her life, as she confronts the possibility that she might die before her son reaches adulthood, Mapplebeck very consciously chooses to find beauty in the image of malignancy, to swerve her film away from being a misery memoir. She lets the pink-dyed clusters remind her of how stray foetal cells remain in the mother’s body long after birth, connecting mother and child at a cellular level forever. 

When Mapplebeck swapped her precarious career as a freelance director in factual TV for academia (she is a professor of digital media at Royal Holloway), it was to ensure stability for her son. But missing filmmaking, she turned first to her DV camera and then to successive generations of iPhones to record their lives together. The result is a documentary with something of the feel of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014); we first see Jim in the womb, giving a thumbs-up during an ultrasound scan, and end with him celebrating his 19th birthday.

There’s something too of the flavour of Michael Apted’s Up! TV series (1964-2019), which checked in with a group of children every seven years to see how their lives were changing. But Motherboard, filmed over 20 years, isn’t a classic observational documentary. Although largely shot in a small flat in South London, it doesn’t feel claustrophobic. 

Time-lapse camerawork captures incandescent sunset skies and a car park adrift with passers-by. The director uses a full palette of digital styles, including rapid montages of the thousands of videos and photos of her baby son growing up, or goofing around in slow-mo. Explicit narration is kept to a minimum, instead the story is moved on through recordings of fraught phone calls and voicemails; the screen fills with text messages, the changes in font styles conveying the passing years. Jim, an endearing performer from toddlerhood to his present life as a drama student, also contributes his own chaotic phone footage of teenage partying, not always ending happily.

Jim’s credit as creative consultant speaks to the consideration Mapplebeck has given to the ethics of exposing her son on screen. Allowing him a veto in the cutting room makes the documentary more collaborative. This isn’t another exploitative instance of ‘sharenting’, when parents monetise their children’s embarrassing exploits in online vlogs with little thought of long-term effects. You get a strong sense that editorial decisions have been made collaboratively with Jim. 

There’s no disguising his curiosity, sadness and irritation with his absent father, but this doesn’t turn maudlin. Instead, Jim’s resilience shines through as he points out that his friends offer him a lot of the things a dad would have provided. Mapplebeck exposes herself on screen too: when she is about to make the first call to Jim’s father in a decade, she puts another iPhone on to film it. It’s fascinating to watch her present a confident persona as she asks whether he has another family. 

After the call ends, there’s a beat or two before she crumples into quiet tears. The editing of the scene leaves the viewer wondering what it’s like to consciously put your life on screen – is it therapeutic? Is it the single parent and feminist in Mapplebeck who is making a point, or is it the filmmaker in her who can’t resist a powerful piece of footage? Is she wondering how the unnamed father will feel, if and when, he sees her film? Presumably Jim’s views won’t come as a huge surprise to him, since some of this material featured in Mapplebeck’s Bafta-winning 2019 short film Missed Call. 

Motherboard moves on from that short through Mapplebeck’s own cancer treatment, Covid lockdowns and Jim’s riskier teenage partying. The director exposes not only her torso under the lurid glow of the radiotherapy lights but the machinations of the filmmaking process – we see how she secured permission to film her doctor’s appointments and her laborious efforts on the festival and grant circuit to raise the funds to make this film. The result is an endearing addition to the coming-of-age genre and an absorbing portrait of a filmmaker juggling personal expression with parental responsibility.

► Motherboard is in UK cinemas now.